the imaginary figure of Captain Frederic
Ingham, pastor of the Sandemanian Church at Naguadavick, and the same
characters have a way of re-appearing in his successive volumes as old
friends of the reader, which is pleasant at first, but in the end a {573}
little tiresome. Mr. Hale is one of the most original and ingenious of
American story writers. The old device of making wildly improbable
inventions appear like fact by a realistic treatment of details--a device
employed by Swift and Edgar Poe, and more lately by Jules Verne--became
quite fresh and novel in his hands, and was managed with a humor all his
own. Some of his best stories are _My Double and How He Undid Me_,
describing how a busy clergyman found an Irishman who looked so much like
himself that he trained him to pass as his duplicate, and sent him to do
duty in his stead at public meetings, dinners, etc., thereby escaping
bores and getting time for real work; the _Brick Moon_, a story of a
projectile built and launched into space, to revolve in a fixed meridian
about the earth and serve mariners as a mark of longitude; the _Rag Man
and Rag Woman_, a tale of an impoverished couple who made a competence by
saving the pamphlets, advertisements, wedding cards, etc., that came to
them through the mail, and developing a paper business on that basis; and
the _Skeleton in the Closet_, which shows how the fate of the Southern
Confederacy was involved in the adventures of a certain hoop-skirt,
"built in the eclipse and rigged with curses dark." Mr. Hale's
historical scholarship and his exact habit of mind have aided him in the
art of giving _vraisemblance_ to absurdities. He is known in
philanthropy as well as in letters, and his tales have a cheerful, busy,
{574} practical way with them in consonance with his motto, "Look up and
not down, look forward and not back, look out and not in, and lend a
hand."

It is too soon to sum up the literary history of the last quarter of a
century. The writers who have given it shape are still writing, and
their work is therefore incomplete. But on the slightest review of it
two facts become manifest: first, that New England has lost its long
monopoly; and, secondly, that a marked feature of the period is the
growth of realistic fiction. The electric tension of the atmosphere for
thirty years preceding the civil war, the storm and stress of great
public contests, and the intellectual stir produced by transcendentalism
seem t